Forum Discussion
Attempting to Create Shared Contact Groups
If you want read-only access, use Mailbox Folder level permissions, not Mailbox level. This applies to both shared mailboxes or user sharing his own contacts. And it's quite easy to automate via PowerShell and the Add-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet.
Thanks for the suggestion. When the advice from MS tech support did not work (recommended was to apply the permissions at the mailbox level), I also tried to apply the permissions at the mailbox folder level and that also did not work.
The issue with this experiment was that the read-only users could not 'see' the shared mailbox or the contact group within the shared mailbox
What people usually forget when adding folder-level permissions is that you need to add at least "FolderVisible" permissions on every folder in the path, including the root one ("top of information store").
I re-created the shared mailbox from scratch once again and made sure that 'FolderVisable' is present at every level. Note however that no permissions can be applied to the contact folder (and this is what I am using the shared mailbox for).
This made no difference, the read-only users still cannot even see the contact folder.
